[PD-dev] proposed new "list" object

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Tim Blechmann wrote:

> > There's one inconvenience with plain "list" since you can't
> > differentiate "list foo" from "foo" using its output; you'd have to
> > use "route list symbol" first and then do whatever you wanted to do
> > differently ("list list foo" for example).  It seemed better to leave
> > that to the imagination of programmers, since there seem to be
> > disagreements about it...
> well, i'd suggest to forbid one-element lists as much as possible, but
> treat them as atoms.
> since pd only handles flat lists, we don't really loose features ... on
> the other hand it will hopefully avoid list vs. symbol/float/pointer
> bugs in patches ... would make it easier to write bug-free patches...

I don't understand what you mean by "forbid one-element lists".  These are
already treated as atoms: [list(, [list 1(, [list one(.  Do you mean have
the [list] object not accept these as input?  I suppose that would depend
on where the conversion from list to atom happens.  If it happens before
the inlet, then that would happen automatically since [list] would only
accept lists on its inlet.

It seems to me that these automatic conversions cause a lot of confusion
and I can't see the benefit or necessity for them.  Could anyone elaborate
on why this automatic conversions of lists is needed?  Does anyone rely on
it?  I have done a lot of general message processing and I've never relied
on that behavior.

.hc


> cheers ... tim
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